Exemplary embodiments relate generally to communication skills training, and more particularly, to the use of computer generated, interactive, virtual humans for communication and skills training.
Social interaction training is a major component of business, military, and medical education. In these fields, communication skills are taught using lectures, role-play, and situational immersion with expert-observation. Currently, medical students, for example, can practice interviewing skills with “standardized patients,” live actors who are given a script to follow for the interview. However, training the actors can be expensive, and it can be difficult to find sufficiently diverse populations of actors, a factor that can make a subtle difference in the interview process. Current methods of training physical examination include standardized human patients (SPs, actors trained to represent an illness) and physical simulators. SPs are a limited resource and are unable to simulate the symptoms of many illnesses (e.g., a lazy eye, cancer). Additionally it is difficult and costly to recruit SPs for intimate exams such as breast, pelvic, and prostate exams. Physical simulators accurately simulate a wide range of illnesses. However, these simulators lack the social interaction required to train interpersonal skills.
Use of simulators is rapidly expanding to educate end-users in military, law enforcement, cultural competency, and medical domains. In these and other application domains, many scenarios exist in which interpersonal touch plays a crucial role (e.g. medical physical examinations). As current interpersonal simulations lack interpersonal touch, they provide an incomplete simulation of human-human communication and can only be applied to a limited set of interpersonal scenarios.
In addition, medical educators have a critical need for educational tools that expose and provide feedback to students on rarely-experienced patient conditions. Currently, educating students on conditions that are infrequent or require immediate treatment are often “catch as catch can.” During their education, students might encounter abnormal physical findings, but curricular planning is difficult given the infrequent or morbid nature of the problem. Missing these experiences negatively impacts medical student education, diagnosis skills, and resulting patient care.
In addition, current simulators lack the ability to complete an After-Action Review (AAR). In AARs, students review their social interaction, and are evaluated using a combination of self, instructor, and peer-group evaluation. The evaluation serves as feedback to effectively improve social interaction skills.
What is needed is an interactive virtual human experience that allows for a wide range of experience, at a low cost, that creates repeatable training experiences without loss of AAR.